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I would be interested to see how many people still have this (and other hardware like old CPUs) going. My 6600GT conked out 2 years ago along with my friend's one. I'm on a 4850 (grrr..) and my friend has a 9800GTX.

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I'm getting very close to giving up on Nvidia completely. I've always used them on desktops especially because of the good driver support. On laptops I've stuck with Intel because of poor Nvidia driver support. (In the olden days you had to get your drivers from the laptop vendor, and then there has been the whole Optimus thing.)

I'm currently on an 8 series chipset on my desktop, and have never upgraded because it is impossible to tell if newer chipsets are actually any better. Nvidia pulled various stunts like renaming existing chipset series, and generally having so many models and numbers that you really couldn't work out anything. If I saw that a particular card used half the power and was 7 times as fast then I could make a rational decision. But when I have to work out that the 2 series is just a renamed 9 series then I give up.

And now they have messed up on the desktop. If you have an Nvidia card on Ubuntu precise then chances are your desktop crashes - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rs/+bug/973096 - and Noveau doesn't work well. Following one of those comments I was able to lock my drivers to an older version. It doesn't look like there is any reason for my next desktop upgrade to include Nvidia graphics. And having driver issues is likely going to cause me to upgrade sooner rather than later.

I do have an Android tablet with Tegra 1 SOC. Nvidia's closed attitude there means I'm predisposed against them for future Android purchases. (Qualcomm have similar issues.) From what I've read TI & OMAP actually have a clue on what open means and try to work with their users rather than against them.

Nvidia has been behind thousands of dollars of my purchases over the years (I don't know what proportion they got). However on the current trajectory they will get zero for the foreseeable future.

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@grotgrot: If you don't need discrete graphics then don't get it. Seriously, extra money/power/noise not worth it if you're not playing games or CAD. Personally I know I have to have NVIDIA because I wanna play games and I do like them (WAY better than AMD and versioning hasn't been hard for me yet).

If versioning is getting you tripped up an awesome source I know other than reviews from Anandtech, Tom's Hardware and Guru3D is hwbot.org. I use hwbot to show me relative performance between parts I am looking at in a price range.

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(My previous card was a 6600 too!) I do play games and I know full well what my video card sounds like when the fan runs at full speed (loud!). However the last "taxing" software I bought was Oil Rush and most of what I play is older than that. I can definitely get by with Intel's current generation of integrated graphics, and after all these years of supporting Nvidia with my wallet, they keep giving me reasons not to give them another cent.

I can't figure out anything from hwbot. With the other sites they compare cards from the same generation. Once you are a few generations behind it is extremely difficult to get any idea of a comparison. Tom's used to have a pretty good table covering several generations and when I last consulted that getting a decent Nvidia card would have doubled performance for me - not enough benefit.

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@grotgrot: If you don't need discrete graphics then don't get it. Seriously, extra money/power/noise not worth it if you're not playing games or CAD.

Agreed... last time I did a hardware upgrade, I just went with a motherboard with integrated graphics (a low-end Radeon option). It's not fancy, but it's perfectly sufficient for running Gnome Shell or any other modern desktop...

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I would be interested to see how many people still have this (and other hardware like old CPUs) going. My 6600GT conked out 2 years ago along with my friend's one. I'm on a 4850 (grrr..) and my friend has a 9800GTX.

I had a 7950 GX2 up until a few months ago, and then I grabbed a GeForce 210 for $10... less power, much, much less heat, it's fanless so there's no noise, and it completely fixed my intermittent suspend issues. It's good enough for desktop use, and I already have a GTX 570 in the gaming system so I didn't need anything too crazy.

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Seeing as nvidia do not support the nouveau project or even recognize it the 7950 i have will essentially be useless and should be discarded in favour of a newer nvidia card? (according to nvidia anyway)

does friends of the earth know about this? landfill full of working nvidia chips because of a company policy? will people stop bitching about amd/ati now? will people understand the importance of an open driver?

i'm not using the card atm so i'll find a chump on ebay to give me a tenner for it ( i think i paid about 100 for it :S )